to reverse entropy: intelligent life is this process of local, provisional reversal of entropy. Time is the dimension of decay and resistance, of dissolution and of recomposition. Time is the process of becoming other of every fragment in every other fragment, forever. Bergson defines the concept of possibility from the point of view of time: ‘Why does reality unfurl? How is it not unfurled? What purpose does time serve (I speak here of real, concrete time, and not of abstract time which is merely the fourth dimension of space)? Doesn’t the existence of time prove the indeterminacy of things? Isn’t time this very indeterminacy?’
The old philosophy, he says, was centred on Eternity: Immutable Categories of Being, Eternal Conjunction of Thought and Idea.
The moderns place themselves on a different ground. They do not treat time anymore as an intruder, a perturbation of Eternity. But they would like to reduce time to a mere appearance. The temporary is for them a confusion of Reason … Let’s forget about theories, let’s stick to the facts. They do not treat time anymore as an intruder, a perturbation of Eternity.
In the first place, Bergson defines the possible in a tautological way: possible is that which is not impossible. Possible is that which is not necessarily going to exist, and simultaneously is not necessarily going to be non-existing. In the second place, Bergson acknowledges this answer is an empty one; it says nothing about the content of the possibility itself. If we want to know more we have to understand what is happening in the empty space of non-impossibility and non-necessity.
Let’s look at the evolution of a living organism. The field of possibility of the organism is included in its genetic code, but the code is not the history of the future. It rather opens a range of possible evolutions, and in this range many different pathways can be taken. Epigenesis (the process by which an organism develops out of its genetic code) constantly exposes the emerging organism to the environment, to the events occurring that the code cannot predict or preform. This field of possibility is not infinite, because it is limited by the genetic conditions inscribed in the code. But it is by no means reducible to merely a deterministic succession of predictable states. As the possible is plural, the environmental events in which the code develops select and shape one form among many.
Possibility is as the intensity of the tantric egg, before and during the process of differentiation: ‘What Spinoza calls singular essence, it seems to me, is an intensive quality, as if each one of us were defined by a kind of complex of intensities which refers to her/his essence, and also of relations which regulate the extended parts, the extensive parts.’2
In A Thousand Plateaus, the passage from possibility to actuality is described as a shift from the intensity of the egg to the deployment of gradients of differentiation, and finally to the full deployment of the extended body.
A Body without Organs is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the Body without Organs is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree – to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is non-stratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organisation of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it changes gradient. ‘No organ is constant as regards either function or position … sex organs sprout anywhere … rectums open, defecate and close … the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments.’ Tantric egg.3
The tantric egg contains uncountable inter-cellular concatenations – the web of possibility. The evolution of these concatenations from the state of virtuality to the state of deployed organism is the space of actualization of the possible. That which I call potency is the condition for this actualization: potency enables the shift from the zero-dimensionality of information to the multidimensionality of the body and of the event. Power, then, is the grid of selections that visualizes, emphasizes and implements one plan or consistence in which a possibility deploys itself, excluding any other possibility from the space of actualization.
The tantric egg is the magma of all possibilities, the chaotic content looking for a shape. The general intellect is the content, semio-capitalism is the gestalt, the generator of coded forms: paradigmatic capture.
Power is the subjection of possible content to a generative code.
The horizon of our time is marked by a dilemma: in the first scenario, the general intellect will unfold and develop according to the paradigmatic line of the semio-capitalist code. In the second scenario, the general intellect is combined into form according to a principle of autonomy and of non-dogmatic and useful knowledge.
Who will decide the outcome of this dilemma?
Who will decide the actualization of one possibility or another?
This is the issue that I’ll develop in the third and final part of this book.
In order to shift from virtuality to actuality, a possibility has to be embodied in a subject and this subject needs potency. How can a possibility be embodied in a subject? How can a subject have potency?
A possibility is embodied in a subject when the magma of possibility meets a concatenation that transforms the magma into intentional subjectivity.
Liberal democracy is the political concatenation that enables the subjectivation of the bourgeois class in the centuries of modernity. Communism is the concatenation that enables industrial workers to gather and fight for social rights.
What concatenation will enable the general intellect to emerge as a conscious force intended to dismantle and reprogram the world according to the concrete usefulness of knowledge?
Potency
Potency, then, is the condition that enables transformation – according to the will of a subject.
History is the space of the emergence of possibilities embodied in subjectivities endowed with potency.
Potency gives us the potential to be free and to transform the environment. On the other hand, power is the subjection of possibilities to a generative code.
Like evolution, history can also be seen as a succession of bifurcations and selections, but in the kingdom of history at each bifurcation consciousness plays a decisive role in the selection among conflicting possibilities.
In order to emerge from the chaotic vibrational dimension of possibility, a body needs potency. Potency is the energy that links a possibility inscribed in the present with its subject.
In order to turn that possibility into form, the subject with potency has to dispense with power that counters the expansion of a conflicting inscribed possibility. Contrary to the assumption of many Spinozian scholars (I’ll refer particularly to Toni Negri), potency is not infinite.
In many texts, particularly in his books The Savage Anomaly and Subversive Spinoza, Negri attributes to Spinoza the
